First thing I saw when I pulled up AOL tonight:

Thousands Expect Apocalypse in 2012

First thought: Oh, fuck, that stupid Mayan calender bullshit again.

This is one of the best things about being an atheist: I don’t sit around shit-scared of “ancient prophecies.” Not that I did before – after all, I lived in central Arizona for many years. You know what’s in central Arizona? Overwhelming woo.

I lived in Sedona when the spaceship that’s hibernating in Bell Rock was going to emerge and take everybody away to the stars. How does the woo crowd know there’s a spaceship in Bell Rock? Just look at it:

Or a bell.

Or a fucking big chunk of sandstone eroded by millions of years of wind, rain and blast-furnace quality sun.

Everybody flocked to roadside rock stands to buy quartz crystals at outrageous prices so they could summon the ship. Nobody wanted to miss the bus. I was going to buy a crystal myself – I like quartz, it’s pretty – but I couldn’t find anything larger than a microdot that was under $30. While I was pawing through the bins in a vain attempt to find something visible yet affordable, the woman next to me waved a fistful of quartz at her friend and babbled, “This one was cold, and this one was kind of warm, but this one’s hot!”

I left forthwith. There’s only so much rampant stupidity you can tolerate in a day.

The big day came. The ship didn’t. The woo-woo crowd had to slink home the next morning clutching their now-cold crystals (funny how quartz cools down when it hasn’t been baking in the sunlight, innit?). I’m not sure how they explained to themselves why the ship didn’t emerge, but they were all out there again years later, where this time, a ship was supposed to land in Chino Valley and take them all away, just like Calgon.

It’s important for the purposes of the story that you know what Chino Valley looks like:

It gets pretty tall sometimes.

So. This herd of very silly people drives out there, having sold their possessions and prepared themselves to fly away to the stars. They park in a field, troop over the hills, and wait.

And wait.

And pretty soon, there’s a glow over the brow of the hill. The ship! The ship must have arrived!

Or it could’ve just been that the hot muffler of the VW bus had come into contact with some of that brittle, dry and above all extremely flammable grass. The fire consumed every last car. The spaceship never came, and these fuckwits had to hike back to town.

So here we are, in the year 2008. There’s a whole new crowd of silly fuckwits selling off their possessions, spending all their money on survival gear, and blathering about how the Mayan calender ends in 2012 and the sun will line up with the galactic center for the first time in 26,000 years on the last day of the Mayan calender and the winter solstice, and of course that means the end of the world!!111!!1!

Not that they’ll listen, but even AOL calmly debunks that, and there I’d been convinced the staff would believe anything:

Experts laugh off these notions. “These prophecies of doom really don’t have any basis in what we know about the Maya,” said Stephen Houston, an anthropology professor at Brown University and an expert in Maya hieroglyphic writing. “The Maya descriptions barely talk about this event.” He said the Mayans saw their calendar coming to an end on the date, but then starting over without any catastrophes.

So. Because of the vagaries of astronomy and the fact that a bunch of Mayans decided to leave the rest of the calender for later (there’s a party on tonight and we’ve got headaches from all these calculations), we’ve got a whole new opportunity to witness a bunch of doomsday freaks make complete and total asses of themselves.

I can hardly wait.

Confession time: I used to be into woo, big time. I’d been a right little skeptic as a kid, despite loving fairy stories. People would tell me about how accurate their horoscopes were: I’d look at more than just mine and notice that a) every single one could apply to me and b) that amazing romance projected for this month somehow never happened. Not to mention the astrologers seemed to leave themselves an awful lot of outs.

People were always making extraordinary claims. I wanted evidence. Unfortunately, no one bothered to teach me much of the scientific method, so evaluating evidence turned out to be a whole other story. Couple this with some supreme boredom, and you had a recipe for woo. In high school, I fell in with a guillable group that believed a lot of crazy things, including the power of rutilated quartz to fortell the future. I still trot that out for fun sometimes – when people don’t understand the way pendulums work and how tiny muscle movements can have a large effect, you can really impress them. Especially when you ask questions you have a high probability of guessing the correct answer to.

Dream interpretation, blowing coincidences out of proportion, channelling, all that rot – had immense amounts of fun with it all. I wouldn’t trade those days, either. I wouldn’t have gotten into SF without that silly belief in magic and powers beyond human ken. Without SF, I doubt I’d have fallen in love with science. I’d probably be writing pedestrian mystery novels by now – which is where I’d originally envisioned taking my writing career. So no science aside from forensics. No excuse to study absolutely everything in the entire universe. No Pharyngula. No En Tequila Es Verdad. No you. And I really like having you guys around.

SF remained, but I abandoned woo a long time back, after learning enough about science to be able to reevaluate my “evidence” and laugh myself sick over how silly and guillable we’d all been. Woo just irritates me now. People don’t think. They don’t examine. They’ll believe nearly anything. And if I wasn’t a moral person, I’d be making an assload of money about now.

You see, I’m good at this woo shit. Being a writer means having to lie convincingly – fiction is nothing more than a pack of lies, salted with enough truth to make it taste good. Back in my woo days, I could persuade nearly anyone of nearly anything: I can see into your dreams. I can see into your future. I can channel. I can wield powers beyond the imagination. Don’t even have to break a sweat.

My morals won’t let me use that power of persuasion for anything other than fiction. And that’s really too bad, because there are a lot of people out there who would pay cash money to have me lie to them. Writing’s damned hard. Woo is easy.

Just take Sylvia Browne.

By way of Bad Astronomy, I came across StopSylviaBrowne.com, and this little gem of a takedown. Robert Lancaster went to her show in Vegas and totally pwned her. It’s an entertaining read.

There are two things here that make me wish I could meet my morals in a dark, deserted alley and strangle them to death.

One, in order to make buttloads of money being a psychic, you don’t even have to be good at it. Her show starts with Astounding Insights. Now me, being a writer who likes to deliver upon what is promised, I would think the Astounding Insights should at least be within the neighborhood of astounding. However, this is how “astounding” is defined in the psychic shyster lexicon:

She then proceeded to spend a few minutes complaining about the weather in Vegas, and said that the dryness was what made her voice
sound the way it did (which sounded to me just like her voice always sounds), and complained that she woke up in the morning hacking and coughing just like a smoker.

She then proceeded to give what was, in effect, a commercial for her upcoming cruises, including ones to the Caribbean, Ireland and Egypt. She then proceeded to give a plug for her “Farewell Lecture Tour”, and assured us that she would not be like Cher, and have “fifteen of them.” She then went on to plug her upcoming book, End of Days.

But wait! There’s more. More of the same sort of shit you’d get from your crazy Aunt Dottie. There’s no need to pay for this kind of crap when you can collar any woo-loving relative and get it completely for free.

She then moves on to “readings.” She’s not even trying anymore. Check these unbelievable psychic powers:

These people generally asked the same types of questions that the audience members on the Montel Williams Show do:

What is my spirit guide’s name? (Sarah, Raul, Martha, Tiffany, Corinne, Doreen and two Elenas were mentioned, among others).

When will I meet Mr./Ms. Right? (two years, three years, two years, next spring, one year, two years, five years)

What will my true love’s name be? (Keith, Joseph, Peter, Carl)

Oh, for fuck’s sake. Two Elenas? Read a baby name book, for crying out loud! It’s a spirit guide – shouldn’t we be talking more along the lines of Ramtha? Shouldn’t there be some zing and zip, some jazz, something a little more fucking interesting than a list of whitebread names that fucking duplicate?

Look, if people ask the same sorts of questions every bleeding time, you could at least get a little creative with the answers. Jeez. As an SF author, I’d have the best spirit guide names evah.

That brings me to the second reason I wish I could murder my morals. The clientele make this job cake. Absolute cake. They ask silly questions whose answers can’t be proved or disproved, and they want so much to believe they’ll swallow anything you feed them. Even when three – three – skeptics got up and asked questions she got absolutely wrong, a woman still followed those skeptics out to the parking lot claiming Sylvia’s the greatest psychic in the whole wide world.

Are you fucking kidding me? People are really this lame? Cha-ching! I could be raking in the dough.

Sylvia’s not even a good cold reader. I am. I’m a pretty damned good one. And I know better than to try to give specific answers that could be debunked.

The thing is, though, I can’t bring myself to do it. I couldn’t live with myself, fleecing people. Fiction writing is one thing – it’s advertised as fiction, it’s got “NOT TRUE!!!” written all over the disclaimer (This book is a work of fiction, all resemblance to people living or dead, blah blah). People know I’m lying to them, but that’s what they’re there for – a good story.

What Sylvia’s providing isn’t even a good story. My little high school woo-group, we told good stories. We could curl the hair on a billiard ball. We could make nearly anyone believe the most ridiculous shit possible, and we came up with more creative names for spirits – there wasn’t a Martha to be found, and you can be damned sure there weren’t two Elenas. We fucking amateurs were so much better at the game. And I could take that, parlay it into a fortune, if I didn’t care for people too much.

You see, I do
n’t think people s
hould be duped.

I don’t think their vulnerabilities should be exploited.

I don’t think it’s right to charge someone $100 a pop to lie to them and say their dear dead dad is very happy on the other side and is still watching over them.

I think people should be encouraged to be skeptical, to think critically, to see the world for what it is, not snookered into believing that all of this marlarkey is really truly true.

I’d have to start every show with a disclaimer: “This is all just fun and games, folks. I’m joshing you. I’m having you on. I’m pulling your leg. Don’t believe a single fucking word that’s emerging from my mouth.” And that would either kill the show or make everybody believe I’m the most genuine psychic in the universe. That last is just not something I could face.

So the easy money’s right out. Can’t do it. Which is really too bad, because I’d love to see Sylvia’s furious face when I stole her believers away….

I’m fast losing my tolerance for woo of all forms. Look – psychics, tarot readers, feng shui, and all that rot’s not a bad or evil thing as long as it’s just entertainment, but when people forget it’s simply a bit of fun and start taking it this fucking seriously, there’s a problem:

Colleen Leduc has an autistic child named Victoria who is enrolled in a public school. She recently got a terrifying phone call — her daughter was being sexually abused. We parents know well the fear and worry a threat to our children can cause, and Leduc was receiving an urgent, frantic phone call from school officials telling her that her daughter was being victimized in the worst way.

So she rushes in to this little meeting.

“The teacher looked and me and said: ‘We have to tell you something. The educational assistant who works with Victoria went to see a psychic last night, and the psychic asked the educational assistant at that particular time if she works with a little girl by the name of “V.” And she said ‘yes, I do.’ And she said, ‘well, you need to know that that child is being sexually abused by a man between the ages of 23 and 26.'”

Before you ask, there is 0 proof this psychic was even within the ballpark. Victoria’s never been sexually abused. There are no men with access to her in that age range. There is nothing. The psychic was pulling this shit right out of her ass.

I have friends who go to psychics. I have friends who are mightily impressed by what the psychics tell them. And usually it’s seemed like a little bit o’ harmless fun, and everybody has a good time, and the fact that the psychic was completely fucking wrong, or was only right because their information was so broad it could be interpreted any way you like, doesn’t seem important because, well, everybody enjoyed themselves.

But this is a slippery slope. Because the psychic may be a good cold reader, or may know the person well enough to work some elements of truth into the bullshit, and a coincidence or two might happen, and people start to want to really believe, and the next thing you know, you have shit like this happening.

And these psychics see nothing wrong, because they believe they have special powers. They’ve selectively remembered the bits that reflect well on their predictive ability, and forgotten all the misses where they were so wrong they couldn’t see right on a clear day with a telescope. The people around them have the same selective memory, which reinforces their faith in their powers. And you know what this psychic’s probably saying to herself right now? Not “I was wrong, and I’ve just destroyed this family.” Not “I was wrong and I caused a mother to go through hell.” No, she’s likely saying, “They just haven’t found the proof. After all, I knew that my client worked with a little girl named V! It’s obvious I was right about everything! I have the power!”

No. You really don’t.

And if we don’t start teaching people to think critically, evaluate evidence dispassionately, and temper emotion with reason, we’re going to have a lot more bullshit like this. We’ll have a world wherein a teacher can get fired for being a wizard and a mom and daughter can have their lives turned upside-down because some silly git went to a psychic who strayed out of “tall, dark and handsome” territory.

That’s not the world I want, thanks ever so much.

Think, people.